You are what you eat?

Throughout literary history, food has been intrinsic to articulations of identity. As this study has shown, the semiotics of consumption – what, how and where characters eat – reveal much about individual subjectivities and collective identities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the notion that ‘you are what you eat’ remains potent within the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, the straightforward association of consumption with selfhood is also challenged and subverted by the fictions analyzed in this chapter, which tend to emphasize the contingency of conventional categories of being and the permeability of culturally constructed binaries. For instance, postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali destabilize the idea that diet functions as a reliable marker of race, nation or ethnicity, pointing instead to the ways in which apparently naturalized cuisines have been imported, hybridized and absorbed by host cultures over time. In doing so, their novels validate David Bell and Gill Valentine’s contention that ‘the nation’s diet is a feast of imagined commensality’ – one that is underpinned by ‘complex histories of trade links, cultural exchange, and especially colonialism’ (1997, 169, my emphasis).